Why Living in Your House Before Renovating Changes Everything

Don’t move into a house and start making changes straight away. Whether that’s redecorating or embarking on something more structural. As first-time renovators, that’s the one piece of advice we’d follow the next time around.

We bought our Edwardian townhouse in Cardiff knowing it would need work. What we didn’t yet understand was the kind of work it needed — and that only became clear once we’d spent time living in it.

How living there shaped our renovation brief

By the time we started working with our architect, we were able to give a detailed brief: our must-haves, our nice-to-haves, and our non-negotiables. That clarity only existed because we’d lived in the house for a year and a half — through different seasons of light and temperature, through busy social periods like Christmas, and through quieter stretches that revealed how the house really functioned day to day.

We got to know which rooms we gravitated to.
Which ones we avoided. How outside noise and the sound of neighbours travelled through the walls.

How living there helped us make decisions

We asked our architect to think creatively, and he did. Early plans were exciting and impressive. But living in the house quickly revealed where some of those ideas didn’t align with how we actually used the space. We let go of a few “sexy” features and rethought certain must-haves in favour of a design that better supported everyday life.

Spending time in the house also sharpened our thinking around finishes and fixtures. Choices that felt decorative early on became practical questions later: in an Edwardian home, will this age well — and will it still feel right once the novelty fades?

There’s no perfect time to renovate

Living in the house before renovating doesn’t mean waiting for the perfect moment. There isn’t one. We started with a newborn baby in tow — which, if anything, made us realise we needed to make haste. It also kept us focused on our reason why when the renovation made life harder.

But living in the house gave us context that we would otherwise not have had. That approach also aligns with guidance often referenced in conservation and architectural practice, where understanding how a building behaves in daily use is considered essential before making permanent changes — particularly in older properties.

Context can also be gained from the experience of others — which is why The Albany Edit exists.
For first-time renovators of period homes to learn from, and be inspired by, those who’ve done it before.

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